Thursday, March 01, 2018

Is This the Runaway?



This time everybody is sitting up and taking notice. Much of Europe is now colder than the high Arctic and it's in the middle of the blackout of winter.

People are looking to the north pole and asking if we're watching the onset of non-linear climate change, also known as runaway global warming.

While merry pictures of a snow-blanketed Vatican City were being broadcasted on every TV on the planet, an ominous thermometer reading was making every climatologist’s blood run cold. A few days ago, at Cape Morris Jesup, the northernmost land outpost in Greenland, the temperature reached 6° Celsius – without a minus sign – and saw a record-breaking 61 hours above freezing.

At the top of the world, there is no doubt left – climate change is palpably happening. Arctic sea ice is at its lowest level on record. During summer, cruise ships can sail unharmed through the famed Northwestern Passage. Greenland is melting at a much faster pace than previously thought. The Big North is warming twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet.

If climatologists have been tweeting messages of disbelief after the Cape Morris Jesup record temperatures, it is because they have a secret fear – that the Arctic’s fever could potentially trigger a non-linear response in the Greenhouse effect one indefinite day. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has witnessed a linear and parallel increase in CO2 concentrations and mean ground temperatures. Yet it is thought that, above a certain warming threshold, a series of positive feedbacks could destabilise the atmospheric system. They call it ‘runaway climate change’. It is precisely what nobody, including deniers, would ever like to see.


This is the third or fourth year of mid-winter high Arctic heat waves, this year being the worst. If it does herald the arrival of runaway climate change that would mean that many of our worst-case scenario calculations have been wrong, unduly optimistic.

- sincere apologies to the Wilburys, especially Orbison, Harrison and Petty but also Lynne, Dylan and Keltner (drums).


3 comments:

  1. I wonder about that myself! It's pretty terrifying.

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  2. My Dutch inlaws are enjoying the frozen canals ... in March! The jet stream used to be consistently around 60N... now it undulates. Def. a climate change effect. Global climate systems appear to be in rapid change.
    Now, if the Gulf stream fails (an entirely plausible climate change scenario) then Europe will have many more cold winters and perhaps miserable summers even as the Artic heats up.

    Good choice of music, alas.

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  3. If the Arctic, Greenland, Alaska - can have crazy high temps over their averages, what is to exempt the rest of the planet? And what happens when this starts hitting at warm times of the year? It's already crazy hotter here in Chicago - electric bill showing an average temp increase of 4 degrees year-on-year in one year.

    Already getting pretty miserable here... so hot all summer, clear deterioration of air quality, very moist air nearly daily now.

    So I am loosing all hope and now I am getting terrified on top of that - I personally hate hot weather and don't function past about 80 degrees.

    And people keep on driving and driving and driving and doing all the same as always all around me here in this provincial neighborhood where ALL my neighbors think nothing of driving just a mere block. And I am considered a weirdo for walking and biking in 2018.

    On the other hand, lived overseas in the 90s in a place that was already flooding and smelled very awful - but they are all still hanging in there. It's just a real bummer on quality of life, at a minimum. Hopefully that's the extent of it, but I am not hopeful anymore after 20+ years of being put down as a 'liberal' reactionary, when in fact I do not subscribe to 'either' party - which are both the same party for unethical corporations, like Shell, who think they have a right to continue on - in 2018 - with this denial BS

    Time for massive class action suits and revolution. NEOLIBERAL ECONOMICS IS DEAD - IT KILLED ITSELF AND THE PLANET

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